Legal Quays and Custom House, south of Lower Thames Street, City of London, 1796

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George Dance office drawings: the drawings of George Dance the Elder and George Dance the Younger
- Town Planning and London Bridge (8)
  - Legal Quays and Custom House, south of Lower Thames Street, City of London, 1796. Preliminary designs and designs, all unexecuted (5)

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Reference number

SM D3/11/2

Purpose

Legal Quays and Custom House, south of Lower Thames Street, City of London, 1796

Aspect

[1] Rough elevation and part-elevation of river front, 1500 ft long and supported by 43 arches

Scale

not to scale

Inscribed

dimensions given and calculations and (verso, cut) [Port?] of Lond. / Fig² Sketches / [e] lyⁿ of Warehouses &ca / [Leg]al Quays / Dance / (cut) 13

Signed and dated

1796

Medium and dimensions

Brown pen and pencil, hatching on coarse laid paper (270 x 520)

Hand

Dance

Verso

Rough elevation and detail Pencil

Notes

The centrally placed custom house is crowned by a gigantic, pyramidal pedestal with an equestrian statue, above two floots with a giant order over a rusticated base with three arches that suggests a triumphal arch, and with four steps down to the river. The 17 bay warehouses on either side are articulated by pedimental double bays (a) that break forward in an a-b-a-c-a-b-a rhythm.

REPRODUCED. Stroud fig.50a; D. Stillman, English Neo-classical architecture, 1988 vol.II, fig.256 (part).

Level

Drawing

If you have any further information about this object, please contact us: drawings@soane.org.uk

Sir John Soane's collection includes some 30,000 architectural, design and topographical drawings which is a very important resource for scholars worldwide. His was the first architect’s collection to attempt to preserve the best in design for the architectural profession in the future, and it did so by assembling as exemplars surviving drawings by great Renaissance masters and by the leading architects in Britain in the 17th and 18th centuries and his near contemporaries such as Sir William Chambers, Robert Adam and George Dance the Younger. These drawings sit side by side with 9,000 drawings in Soane’s own hand or those of the pupils in his office, covering his early work as a student, his time in Italy and the drawings produced in the course of his architectural practice from 1780 until the 1830s.

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